Et si le béton, omniprésent et invisible, façonnait notre monde autant qu’il menace notre avenir ? Concrete retrace l’histoire fascinante de ce matériau, des prouesses romaines aux défis écologiques d’aujourd’hui.

An in-depth look at places-nation-states, states, and provinces-that are geographically side-by-side but otherwise, worlds apart.   In the summer of 1968, Mary Soderstrom and her husband loaded up their VW Beetle and immigrated to Canada from the United States. The contrast between their new home and their old led to a long-running reflection on what makes the two countries different. How could two places that are similar in so many ways be so disparate in others?   In Frenemy Nations, Soderstrom answers this question by addressing a range of geographical "odd couples": including the United States and Canada; New Hampshire and Vermont; Alberta and Saskatchewan; Haiti and the Dominican Republic; Scotland and Ireland; Rwanda and Burundi; and more. Through it all, Soderstrom shows how tiny differences-in geographic features, colonial histories, resource competition, education, women's roles, language, and migration-can have outsized effects on how polities develop.

"A beautiful interweaving of memoir and history, of driving narrative and insightful reflection."-Ken McGoogan, author of Dead Reckoning and Kerouac's Ghost Accessible and entertaining, Road Through Time begins with the story of how anatomically modern humans left Africa to populate the world. She then carries us along the Silk Road in Central Asia, and tells of roads built for war in Persia, the Andes, and the Roman Empire. She sails across the seas, and introduces the first railways, all before plunking us down in the middle of a massive, modern freeway. The book closes with a view from the end of the road, literally and figuratively, asking, can we meet the challenges presented by a mode of travel dependent on hydrocarbons, or will we decline, like so many civilizations that have come before us?